


we are beginning

by cynicalRaconteur



Category: Community
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-10
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-25 00:50:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/633333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cynicalRaconteur/pseuds/cynicalRaconteur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is one gigantic, terrible mistake that Jeff Winger can’t make himself regret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we are beginning

To: deandangerous@greendalecomcol. com  
From: wingerj@greendalecomcol.com

Do you still want me to pick up popcorn for tonight? Also, I cannot believe that your actual Greendale email address is ‘deandangerous’.  
You suck,  
Jeff.

 

To: wingerj@greendalecomcol.com  
From: deandangerous@greendalecomcol.com

Jeffrey! How dare you! You know Dean Dangerous is important to me!  
And yes, could you? I seem to be all out. And could you wear that delicious black nail polish?  
All my love,  
Craig xox

 

To: deandangerous@greendalecomcol. com  
From: wingerj@greendalecomcol.com

No.

 

To: wingerj@greendalecomcol.com  
From: deandangerous@greendalecomcol.com 

To the popcorn or the nail polish?

 

To: deandangerous@greendalecomcol. com  
From: wingerj@greendalecomcol.com

You know very well which.

 

To: wingerj@greendalecomcol.com  
From: deandangerous@greendalecomcol.com

:(  
Please, Jeffrey?

 

To: deandangerous@greendalecomcol. com  
From: wingerj@greendalecomcol.com

Ugh. Fine.  
I hate you and I hate your smileys.

 

To: wingerj@greendalecomcol.com  
From: deandangerous@greendalecomcol.com

Yes, yes, love you too. See you tonight, I have to comfort a student. How do you even become a Scientologist accidentally?

 

 

“Jeff, who are you texting? Everyone you like is here, for God’s sake.”

Shirley cleared her throat pointedly, and Jeff stuffed the phone back into his pocket. Not too fast. No need to look suspicious.

“I’m not texting, I’m emailing.”

“Not using your fancy BBM on your fancy expensive poser BlackBerry?” asked Britta, smirking.

“No, because you can only BBM to another BlackBerry. Duh-doy.” Jeff squashed the urge to stick his tongue out at her.

They bickered for a few minutes more, before the rest of the group threw balls of paper at them, and Pierce declared that ‘apples and blackberries are for jelly’, thus ending that particular debate. The study group teetered on the edge of doing some actual work, but luckily, the Dean burst in. Jeff was careful to always refer to him as the Dean while he was on campus, so much so that Craig and the Dean were almost different people to him. Craig adored dogs and Ella Fitzgerald and made incredible paella and sang ‘Popular’ from Wicked in the shower every freaking morning and the Dean said stuff like

“Dean-dong! Attention all students!”

The Dean swept into the room wearing a startlingly green and froofy dress, complete with wings and glittery silver wand, and Jeff probably should have expected that, actually.

“Study group,” the Dean greeted them, curtseying. “Tomorrow we’re celebrating Support Our Troops Day with –you guessed it – a ball! And before that, there’ll be a joint event with City College, to demonstrate that peace can be brought to any war.”

“What if I don’t want to celebrate the violent raping of Third World countries by the capitalist disctatorship we call America?” Britta spat, leaning up out of our chair. It took three seconds for her to sit back down again, defeated by catcalls and the occasional flying pen.

The Dean cleared his throat. “Well. Make sure you think of a happy thought, and fly yourselves down to the cafeteria tomorrow at noon for the joint event. In costume if you please!”

He bopped Annie on the head with his wand, and she smiled despite herself.

“Can my happy thought be me, not attending yet another stupid dance?” Jeff drawled, tipping his chair back on its rear legs and smirking up at the Dean.

The Dean frowned. “Jeffrey. I think we’re going to have to have a conversation about your school spirit. Alone.”

Jeff knew he was meant to say no, in order to keep up this little pretence they had going. In fact, he was quite sure his mouth was going to say no (in the form of a suitably witty retort), but what actually came out was, “Ugh, fine. Whatever. You go ahead guys, I’ll catch you up.”

It was a risky move. Annie gave him a very strange look as she left, and Abed...well, he also gave Jeff a strange look, but that was pretty much par for the course. Neither he nor Craig looked at each other as the room emptied, nor as they efficiently shut the blinds (Craig taking the left side of the room, Jeff the right). For a moment, they just sort of stood in the middle of the room, neither knowing quite what to do with this paradigm shift.

Then Jeff raised an eyebrow.

“Glinda the Good Fairy?”

Craig laughed, and patted him on the shoulder. “No, silly. Tinkerbelle. Glinda wears pink.”

Jeff rolled his eyes, and Craig swatted him lightly on the arm, before making a doomed attempt to fix Jeff’s fashionably unbuttoned collar. Jeff caught his wrists.

“Hey. I’m being artfully rumpled here.”

Craig sighed. “You’re lucky you look so good rumpled, mister. Otherwise you’d have to wear ties all the time like the rest of us mortals.”

Jeff frowned a little. He wasn’t quite sure why this sentiment bothered him, but it did. “You’d look good rumpled,” he tried.

Craig laughed again, but there was a sad edge to it this time. “Don’t you lie to me, Jeffrey Winger.”

On impulse, Jeff leaned down and pecked him on the mouth. Craig smiled against his lips, and Jeff could feel his own lips curving upwards too as Craig stepped more into his space, skirt rustling loudly as it got crumpled against Jeff’s legs. Jeff pulled away before he could get too distracted, but the smile didn’t leave.

Craig stepped back and smoothed down his skirt.

“You’d better get going. Don’t want to miss class.”

“Yeah.”

Neither of them moved.

“I mean I should go to. Lots of work, you know.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Still no movement.

Craig’s smile softened into something fond and loving, then his face somehow morphed into that of the Dean, and as he walked past Jeff, his fingers didn’t so much as brush Jeff’s hand. He left, and Jeff stood, alone, in contemplative silence.

“Nice misdirect earlier, Jeff. Classic.”

Jeff whirled.

“Abed! Christ, I didn’t know you were here!”

He pressed his hands to his chest in an attempt to keep his heart from actually breaking through his ribcage.

“I wasn’t,” Abed said helpfully. “I waited outside and then when the Dean left I came back in to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“Well it seemed like you and the Dean were having a private moment and I didn’t want to disturb.”

“No, why did you want to speak to me?” Jeff moved his hands from his chest to run them distractedly through his hair.

“I wanted to know who you were texting. Like I said your response to Britta was a classic misdirect. I figured if I just followed you around all day I would find the answer, but I didn’t think it would happen so soon.”

“Okay.” Deep breaths. Stop panicking. “Okay, Abed? Can you please, please, not tell anybody about this?”

“Why?”

“Because I asked you to?”

Abed shook his head solemnly. “I don’t think I can lie to the group for such a flaky reason Jeff.”

“You don’t have to lie! You just have to not tell the truth!”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“No,” Jeff smirked. “It isn’t.”

“Huh.” Abed cocked his head to one side. “I guess I don’t have to tell them right away.” He brightened. “I should wait for the opportune dramatic moment!”

Jeff sighed. “Yeah. Okay. Thanks.” Then he checked his bare wrist for the time, and hurried from the classroom.

 

 

Jeff seemed to have a habit of absolutely 100% meaning to do things and then just doing something completely different when it came to Craig. For example, he hadn’t meant to kiss him in the study room and he had, and then that evening he definitely meant to tell Craig that Abed knew and it would only be a matter of time before the rest of the group found out and they should probably make some sort of action plan, but then he just...didn’t. He’d walked into his apartment to find Craig already there, setting up the DVD player, and he’d made the popcorn to pass time as he’d worked out what to say, and then he’d poured himself a whiskey so he’d be able to say it, and then he’d sat down on the couch with Craig and popcorn and The Bodyguard beginning on the screen and he’d gone to talk and he just said...

“I’ve never seen this before.”

And Craig had patted him on the knee and whispered, “Shush. Whitney is present.” And that was that.

The movie started with them just sitting next to each other, not touching. But the whiskey made his mind a little soft around the edges, and somehow when the credits rolled he was sprawled along the couch with his head in Craig’s lap, and Craig’s fingers skritching his scalp.

“Hey, Craig?” he murmured drowsily. “Do you have a costume I can wear tomorrow?”

“Well,” Craig replied, voice rich with amusement. “There’s always the Dalmatian costume...”

Jeff rolled onto his back so he could look directly up at his...boyfriend?

“In the words of the indomitable Meatloaf – ‘I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that.’”

Craig snorted. Jeff smiled, dopily. That was something he...really liked, about Craig. The man had said ‘I love you’ pretty early in their relationship (read as: three days in), but what with how he’d been acting since they met, this seemed pretty standard. It was weird, how it hadn’t bothered him. But even better, Craig had yet to ask, in five months, for Jeff to say it back. He just kept saying it as if Jeff was saying it back to him every time, and Jeff made references like this without suffering a minor heart attack, so maybe he was getting somewhere.

“There’s a GI outfit I ordered a couple years ago in the back of my closet. I was having a butch phase, and it’s two sizes too big for me.”

Jeff gasped in mock offence. “Craig Pelton. Are you calling me fat?”

Craig raised an eyebrow. “I am just saying Jeffrey, sometimes I am embarrassed to be seen out with you.”

Jeff laughed, but again there was just some kind of sad undertone to the joke that he couldn’t quite pin down. Lost for words, Jeff went down the coward’s route: he stole Craig’s glasses.

Craig shrieked and attempted to get them back, but even a little tipsy Jeff was on his feet like lightning and holding them above his head, confident that Craig would have to beg him to give them back, and he could extract all sorts of favours. Instead, Craig leapt at him from the couch and climbed him like a freaking monkey, before plucking the glasses from his outstretched hand. Jeff stood, gobsmacked. Craig was holding himself up flush against his body just by wrapping his legs around Jeff’s waist. He wasn’t even holding on or anything. Jeff swallowed.

“How did you get so strong?” he said, voice rough with desire.

“Dance,” Craig said, primly, and made as if to climb down.

Jeff’s arms wrapped around him and took his full weight easily. Craig’s eyes went wide.

If the noise he made then was hot, the noise he made when Jeff threw him bodily onto the bed and pinned him down was scorching.


End file.
